Contentville

» see contentville.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Steve Brill had already built Court TV and American Lawyer and was running Brill's Content, a magazine about the media's own failures, when he decided the web's real problem was that nothing on it cost money. Contentville was the fix. It was announced in February 2000 as a partnership with CBS, which took a thirty-five percent stake and paid for it with forty million dollars of advertising and promotion across its networks rather than with cash. Brill Media held thirty-four percent and ran the thing. NBC, Primedia, Microsoft, Ingram and EBSCO filled out the rest, and the partners together put in more than a hundred million dollars of money and airtime.

The store went live on 12 July 2000. You could buy a magazine article for $2.95 out of an index covering around two thousand publications, or a screenplay, or a presidential speech, or a book, or a doctoral dissertation. The pitch was that every piece of writing anyone had ever done deserved a price tag and a checkout button, and that the free web was an accident that would correct itself.

It corrected in the other direction. On 28 September 2001, fourteen months after opening, Brill posted a message on the site and laid off fifteen people. His words were that "we simply were unable to entice enough people for us to see our way to a viable enterprise." Three weeks later Brill's Content suspended publication too, and the whole Brill media operation came apart in the same autumn.

~ the dossier ~

~ the writers ~

Five days after launch, the National Writers Union noticed that a great deal of what Contentville was selling belonged to its members and had been licensed by the publications rather than by the people who wrote it. Jonathan Tasini, the union's president, had a copyright suit against the New York Times working its way toward the Supreme Court on exactly that question. He wrote to Brill on 17 July 2000 and they met eight days later.

What came out of it was unusual for the period: Brill agreed that writers who registered their work through the Publication Rights Clearinghouse would get thirty percent of what Contentville collected for it. Tasini called it a model. It was a real settlement with real money attached, and the store that made it was dead inside a year, so the model had nowhere to go.

~ the dissertations ~

The louder fight was academic. Contentville had a deal with UMI Dissertations Publishing and was offering master's theses and doctoral dissertations for sale, which meant hundreds of scholars in the United States and Canada found their own unpublished graduate work on a shopping page one morning without having heard about it first. The complaint was not only about money. A dissertation is a document people spend years being embarrassed by, and a checkout button turns it into merchandise.

~ eight years later ~

In April 2009, with newspapers collapsing, Brill surfaced again with Journalism Online, a company whose entire purpose was to get publishers paid for web content. The press coverage made the obvious joke. He had been early rather than wrong, and being early by nine years costs the same as being wrong.

From where I sat, this entire argument was theoretical. In 2000 I was sixteen, on a dial-up account in Turkey, and a site that charged $2.95 in dollars for a magazine article was not a thing I was going to lose an argument with. The free web that Contentville existed to correct was the only web that was reachable.

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